Meet Our Woodworking Instructors

Meet the Highland Woodworking Instructors

Highland Woodworking's education program attracts many talented and qualified woodworkers and craftsmen willing to impart their knowledge and share their skills with those eager to learn.

Stuart Altschuler
Stuart Altschuler, the director and lead educator for Prestige Framing Academy, LLC, has been in the picture framing and art gallery business for over 30 years. In addition to his other activities, Mr. Altschuler, a Certified Picture Framer, and a Guild Commended Framer is the frame design editor for Picture Framing Magazine and has done video for Fine Woodworking. A master craftsman, today Altschuler continues a tradition started three generations ago. Visit his website at www.framingacademy.com.

Chad Awalt
Since earning his bachelors' degree in Anatomy and Physiology in 1981, Chad has actively pursued his talent for carving by studying under the masters. He is a Colleague of the National Sculpture Society, and his work has been shown all over the country and has won many awards. Visit his website at www.chadawalt.com.

Julie Bender
Julie Bender is an accomplished fine artist who is enthralled with pyrography, the art of wood burning. Her work is driven and motivated by her passion for art and nature, the animal and human form. She successfully captures the soul and character of her subjects by bringing to her art work that "special spark" that sometimes is nothing more than a twinkle in someone's eye, or the mischievous bend in the corner of a smile. Visit her website at www.burningwithenthusiasm.com.

Curtis Buchanan
Curtis has been making Windsor chairs for a living since 1984 and has taught a number of workshops in the U.S. and abroad. He has written articles for and has been featured in Woodwork, Home Furniture, Fine Woodworking and American Woodworker. He is also the co-founder of Greenwood, a community-based sustainable forestry initiative in Latin America. His work can be seen on his web site at www.curtisbuchananchairmaker.com.

Jane Burke
Jane was born in South Africa and moved to Paraguay in 1987 where she was introduced to marquetry. Since moving to the US in 1996, she has developed her own marquetry technique which she promotes by giving seminars around the US at woodworking shows and clubs and through sales of her DVD, The Art of Marquetry. Jane has also appeared on several TV shows demonstrating how marquetry is done, as well as having articles published in magazines in the UK, USA and Japan. Jane sells her work through her website, www.gtcreations.com.

Phil Colson
Phil has been working with wood for most of his life. His father, who was a master craftsman, exposed him to woodworking at an early age. It was here that he developed his love of wood. As a young man he was a dancer, stained glass designer and horticulturist. He brings all three of these disciplines to his turnings; a sense of balance, design and knowledge of wood. He selects pieces of wood for their inner beauty and unique grain patterns. Phil has studied with Nick Cook, Franck Johanneson, Chris Stott, Ray Key and Christophe Nancy from France. Visit his woodturning website at www.philcolsonwoodturner.com.

Jim Dillon
Jim Dillon has been teaching at Highland since 2000. His day job is as Cabinetmaker at Fernbank Science Center, building exhibits. He was self-employed as a custom furniture maker for 8 years, and before that, taught college English. He finds that coaching other woodworkers to develop their problem-solving and hand skills is an inspiration for his own work.

Mark Duginske
Fourth-generation woodworker Mark Duginske has written 10 woodworking books - including Band Saw Handbook, the best selling band saw book in the world - made instructional videos and has been a contributing editor to Fine Woodworking magazine. Also an inventor, Duginske holds six patents for woodworking machine accessories and recently licensed his patented FastTrak product line to Kreg Tool Company. Over the last fifteen years he has taught woodworking classes for people of all skill levels from Maine to California, and has now set up his own woodworking school in Wisconsin, Prairie River Woodworking.

Peter Galbert
Peter Galbert is a full time chairmaker. Before specializing in green wood chairmaking he built custom cabinetry and furniture as well as museum displays.Peter has taught at many craft schools around the country including the Penland School of Crafts, the North Bennet Street School, the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship, Peters Valley Craft School, Kelly Mehlers School of Woodworking, Highland Woodworking and the Arrowmont School of Crafts.

Mike Goldberg
I helped a friend restack an old heart pine log cabin in the late seventies. As I held the end of this massive, beautifully hewn timber, I was mesmerized by the precision that a carpenter some 100+ years earlier had carved this dovetail joint with only an axe. And it fit perfectly! I was hooked and have been striving for that same perfection ever since. I’m sure it had something to do with having an excellent woodshop teacher in high school, but clearly there had to be some kind of taste for wood in my psyche. After spending most of the 80’s building log homes, I was bored by the roof systems we kept putting on them, 4x8 rafters. Then one day another friend put a mortise machine in my hands and showed me the mortise and tenon. I had to have more, so I joined this group of guys up north called The Timberframers Guild. And it was through them I truly found home. That seemed like a lifetime ago. It could be said I chose heavy timber, but in retrospect I truly believe timber building chose me because it gave me the chance to work on projects around the world, with the most talented people in the industry today. Looking back,  I can’t help but be humbled by more than 30 years of gracious opportunities given me by these fellows of timberframing.

Bob Flexner
Bob Flexner has operated his own furniture making and restoration shop in Norman, Oklahoma for 30 years. For the last 15 years, he has taught wood finishing and restoration. His accomplishments include writing the authoritative and best-selling book, Understanding Wood Finishing, now in its second, fully revised edition, editing Finishing and Restoration (Professional Refinishing) magazine, making the award-winning videos, Repairing Furniture and Refinishing Furniture, and writing the long-running columns "Finishing" in Woodshop News and "Flexner on Finishing" in Popular Woodworking. Bob is probably best known for defining the products used in wood finishing and organizing them into categories that make them easily understandable.

Frank Klausz
At the age of 14, Frank began his woodworking career in an apprenticeship system that had remained essentially unchanged since the Middle Ages. What was unusual about it, was that Klausz entered into a formal, contractual apprenticeship with his own father. At the end of four years, Frank became a certified journeyman cabinetmaker, on his way to becoming a master (which required one year of work in each of three different shops). Ten years later, Frank and his wife, Edith, packed their lives in three suitcases and left Hungary. Like the journeymen of old, Frank was on the road except that his only tools were his hands and head, not chisels and saws in a toolbox strapped to his back. Over the years Frank has built furniture for the New Jersey State House, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Malcolm Forbes amongst others. He has taught numerous woodworking seminars in the US and Canada and we offer a series of his DVD's.

Kreg McMahon
Kreg McMahon was born in 1954, when real woodshop was still taught in high school. And that’s where he got his first taste of woodworking, that and playing in the new post-war housing tracts in the San Fernando Valley. His father’s side of the family was in sales, and his mother’s side was in construction, so it’s not surprising that’s Kreg spent the first half of his life in sales. From the age of 12, Kreg has knocked on people’s doors to ask if they had any small jobs to do: weeding, cleaning, trash removal. Kreg has sold Amway, insurance, and advertisements in the Yellow Pages. But he’s now in the second half of his life — working as a carpenter and running a one-man business: “Honey-Do Handyman and Carpentry Service.” For inspiration and new tips, Kreg turns to the HGTV Network and the New Yankee Workshop. He likes to say: “There’s always something to learn.” Visit his website at www.honeydokreg.com.(Bio courtesy THISisCarpentry.com)

Sabiha Mujtaba
Sabiha has been a full-time woodworker and carver for 19 years. She is a member of the Furniture Society, and her work has been shown in American Craft Council Shows, in the Decatur Arts Festival and the ACC Southeast. She was also featured in Fine Woodworking Magazine Design Book Seven. She is represented by Shidoni Gallery in Santa Fe, NM. Visit her website at www.chrysaliswoodworks.com.

Alan Noel
Alan is the proprietor of Noel's Woodworks here in Atlanta and has been a professional furniture restorer for over 25 years. He has extensive experience in a wide range of finishing techniques. He writes regular columns for Finishing and Restoration magazine and for Highland Hardware's Wood News Online™, and has also written for Wood magazine. Alan has taught his skills throughout the Southeast and has served as a finishing consultant for various furniture manufacturers.

Toshio Odate
Toshio Odate was born in Japan in 1930 and during the immediate post-war years served an apprenticeship as a maker of sliding doors. He went on to study art and design, and in 1958 was awarded a fellowship for the introduction of traditional Japanese woodworking in the United States, where he has remained. Over the following four decades, Odate taught industrial design and sculpture at the university level, exhibited his own sculptures, and demonstrated Japanese woodworking techniques and attitudes at many workshops, classes and seminars throughout the U.S. and Europe. He has written articles for Fine Woodworking, American Woodworker, Woodwork and Woodshop News magazines, and is the author of Japanese Woodworking Tools: Their Tradition, Spirit and Use and Making Shoji. Odate has also been featured in several videos and televison productions, including Martha Stewart Living and the Woodwright's Shop. He currently resides in Woodbury, Connecticut.

Hal Simmons
Hal began turning in 1997. He has studied with Nick Cook, Willard Baxter, David Ellsworth, Johannes Rieber, Chris Scott, Soren Berger and Ray Key. He enjoys traditional spindle bowl and hollow form turning using both exotic and domestic woods. Hal is President of the Chattahoochee Woodturners and member of the Georgia Association of Woodturners.

Jay Wiggins
Jay hails from the North Carolina foothills and has been in Atlanta since 1978. He began his furniture-making career in 1991, apprenticing for 2.5 years with Atlanta Furniture maker Jack Harich. He has studied at Penland Craft School, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, The Center for Furniture Craftsmanship and has studied under chair maker Brian Boggs, in his shop, on several occasions. He taught at The Dogwood School of Fine Woodworking from 2006-2011 and he has had his own shop for 18 years now. Twentieth Century Modernism is the jumping off point for his designs. In 2001 his work was included in the show “Objects of Use: Handmade by Design”a survey of American Craft at the turn of the new millennium at The American Craft Museum in NYC. Jay performs old time music with The Muleskinner MacQueen Trio here in Atlanta. Check out his work at www.jmwigginsfurniture.com.